W.01 Reconsidering Graduate Education and Teacher Training in Basic Writing Contexts Sponsored by: The Council on Basic Writing

Level: All

Hashtags: Basic Writing (#BW), Pedagogy (#Pedagogy), Writing Program Administration (#WPA)

Abstract: This workshop will focus on issues and strategies for graduate education and faculty

development in Basic Writing.

Full Description:

Based on member feedback from the 2017 CCCC Convention, the 2018 Council on Basic Writing

workshop will focus on issues related to graduate education and teacher training for Basic Writing. As

Gleason’s (2006) study reveals, there are relatively few graduate courses devoted exclusively to Basic

Writing offered across the nation, and this has continued to be a regularly raised topic on the CBW list-

serv. To address this concern, this year’s workshop will focus on developing concrete strategies that can

be applied to graduate courses on BW and/or faculty development workshops offered in local contexts.

"Graduate Education for BW Instructors: A Course Model"

The keynote speaker, who has been teaching a graduate course in teaching BW for over twenty-five

years, will describe her latest iteration of the course, an online course with four weekend workshops.

This delivery system, designed for distance learners and busy adult learners, targets both graduate

students in an MA program and current BW instructors who may have previously lacked access to such a

course. A key feature of the class is professional mentoring through participation in the Council on Basic

Writing (CBW) discussion list, authoring of Composition Frequently Asked Questions (CompFAQs) wiki

material on BW, which serves as a kind of intermediary "publication,” and encouragement to present at

conferences and submit manuscripts.

Immediately after the keynote, participants will work together to consider similarities and differences

between an audience of graduate students and of current instructors, the areas in which they share

needs, and where they may also have distinctly different concerns. Finally, workshop participants will

reflect on how instruction or faculty development can best be delivered to preservice teachers and to

current instructors, both of whom are emerging professionals.

"Respect for Students = Advocacy: Revisiting a Social Justice Policy for BW"

Building from the keynote discussion, the next presenter will offer examples of teacher-based advocacy

for students in BW, grounded in principles of horizontal organization and leaderless movement.

Workshop participants will then be [presented with an opportunity to engage in teacher-based advocacy

through revisiting CBW’s 2008 Social Justice Initiative for Basic Writing (published in BWe, CBW’s online

W.01 Reconsidering Graduate Education and Teacher Training in Basic Writing Contexts open access journal; a link will be distributed to workshop participants in advance). This initiative was

created in the months before the Great Recession of 2008, and the social movements that followed for

economic and climate justice, Black lives, indigenous, immigrant, and refugee rights, and the alt-right,

movements that intersect with the lives and concerns of many students. This workshop suggests that

respect for students can mean not only listening to students’ concerns, but also advocating for those

concerns inside and outside the classroom.

"Faculty Development and ALP"

In the following session, presenters will share their model for faculty development for an Accelerated

Learning version of BW. The ALP is model a recent attempt to reinvent BW to meet institutional,

cultural, and governmental demands about developmental education. New programs often require

innovative approaches to faculty training and development in order to meet changing demands, and this

training is often complicated by the diverse levels of experience within BW faculty. Three ALP instructors

at different stages in their careers will briefly share what ALP training looks like at their large urban

community college, how each individual person learned to “do” ALP as an instructor, and how it has

shaped and reshaped their teaching and views on Basic Writing. The second half of the session will ask

participants to develop and share ideas for an instructor training model that brings together newer,

experienced, and contingent faculty voices to “do” ALP (or a similar model) together.

"Sponsoring Revision in the Basic Writing Class"

Shifting from program-level faculty development to more concrete examples that can be directly applied

to the BW classroom, the penultimate session will allow participants to act as a real audience for a

sample faculty development workshop focused on teaching revision. While students in BW may

themselves be used to experiencing revision as a punitive exercise meant to accommodate a teacher’s

comments, the presenters argue that it might be well worth the time to similarly train our new faculty

out of considering revision as a teleological event. To do this, experienced faculty/writers would do well

to abandon “process” and “product” in favor of words like “evolution” where essays (or any kind of

writing for that matter) must account for and adapt to the intellectual pressures driving a writer’s

inquiry. To illustrate this point, participants will be given a short draft of student writing that attempts to

use one source and a copy of a brief second text to be incorporated in the student’s revision.

Participants will then practice writing feedback that is neither summative nor evaluative. Instead, the

workshop will discuss feedback strategies that help open up spaces for encouraging students in BW to

reimagine their existing draft as neither right or wrong, good or bad, but instead to reexperience their

draft as historical, that is, as a document that changes over time.

"Reimagining Graduate Preparation for Teaching Basic Writing in the Two-Year College"

W.01 Reconsidering Graduate Education and Teacher Training in Basic Writing Contexts Closing the loop from where our workshop day started, we return to the preparation of graduate

students for the Basic Writing classroom.The final pair of presenters will share their research on the

history and current status of graduate preparation for community college English faculty and discuss the

possible futures for community college/university partnerships envisioned by the 2016 TYCA Guidelines

for the Graduate Preparation of Two-Year College English Faculty. They will devote the bulk of the

session to exploring possibilities for collaboration between CBW and TYCA more deeply through

developing curricula and encouraging practicum opportunities for graduate students aspiring to teach

basic writing in community college settings.

"Toward a Position Statement on BW Studies"

To conclude the day, workshop participants will provide feedback on an in-process draft of a CBW

position statement on teacher preparation for BW. During the 2017 CBW workshop, participants worked

through an intentional brainstorming processes to develop a draft of four principles of basic writing

studies. Building on that draft, the facilitators of this final session will lead workshop members through

further discussion, debate, revisions, and ratification of those principles. Ideally, the 2018 workshop will

end the day by formalizing an official position statement on the teaching and study of basic writing that

might be disseminated outside the organization.

W.02 Writing Teachers Writing: Transforming through Creative Nonfiction Sponsored by: The CCCC Standing Group on Creative Nonfiction

Level: All

Hashtags: Creative Writing (#CreativeWriting), Pedagogy (#Pedagogy), Public, Civic, and Community

Writing (#Community)

Abstract: Participants will explore creative nonfiction through writing to prompts and discussing

teaching strategies and issues.

Full Description:

Creative nonfiction is both record and agent of transformation. This workshop invites participants to

engage in languaging and laboring, experiencing a day of creative nonfiction as writers, discussants, and

teachers of this multifaceted genre. Participants will respond to various invitations to write, and leaders

will guide discussions of ways to adapt the day’s prompts and processes to the participants’ own writing

and teaching.

Four segments will be devoted to writing in response to nine different prompts, two to presentations on

creative nonfiction strategy and pedagogy. The workshop concludes with the sharing of writing and

reflection on the value of creative nonfiction writing for ourselves and our students.

Schedule:

9:00 a.m. Introductions

9:15–9:30 a.m. Three prompts

9:30–10:30 a.m. Writing time & sharing

10:30–10:45 a.m. Break

10:45–11:15 a.m. Presenter 1

11:15–11:25 a.m. Two prompts

11:25 a.m.–12:00 p.m. Writing time & sharing

12:00–1:15 p.m. Lunch (discussion of writing encouraged)

1:15–1:45 p.m. Presenter 2

1:45–1:55 p.m. Two prompts

1:55–2:30 p.m. Writing time & sharing

W.02 Writing Teachers Writing: Transforming through Creative Nonfiction 2:30–2:45 p.m. Break

2:45–2:55 p.m. Two prompts

2:55–3:30 p.m. Writing time & sharing

3:30–4:15 p.m. Group workshop/revision

4:15–5:00 p.m. Sharing of writing

SPEAKER 1 (prompt): Thresholds

Write a scene that marks either a significant beginning or ending in your life. It may be a conception, the

beginning or end of a relationship, a first or last breath, the stirrings of an idea, the signing of an official

document. Now reflect: if you wrote about a beginning, was that beginning also an ending? Did it

involve loss? If you wrote an ending, did that ending also make way for something new?

SPEAKER 2 (prompt): Times, They Are a-Changin’: Tracking Transformation through Selfies

Locate the first-ever photo of yourself you posted to social media. Find a recent posted photo. Describe

the selves you constructed in each. Reflect on what’s happened to you in the intervening time; to people

you know; to the world. How are things the same or different? What good/bad things have happened?

Insignificant/important? Achievements/regrets? Any advice from the younger/older self to the other?

SPEAKER 3 (prompt): Media Imprints

The stories experienced in childhood, be they books or television, harbor a peculiar resonance—that

first scary movie, Saturday morning cartoons, a book read late into the night. Is there a specific piece of

media from your childhood that has recurrently popped up in your own mind’s narrative? How has it

influenced your writing? What emotions cling to this story and what parallels or symbolism can be linked

to your own history?

SPEAKER 4 (presentation): Languaging for Justice: The Potentially Transformative Power of Creative

Nonfiction

Creative nonfiction is often seen as an apolitical genre that encourages students to have a passive,

introspective relationship to the world beyond their immediate experience. Speaker 4 will describe a

course, “Autobiography and Activism,” that uses CNF assignments to encourage students to engage the

larger world. As they write personal stories and reflect on their responses to broader issues and public

activists, students move beyond sometimes ill-informed ideas about social action to experience

themselves as capable of influence and transformation. In this context Speaker 4 will explore the

relationship between the “personal” and the “political” in CNF.

SPEAKER 5 (prompt): The Watershed Transformation

W.02 Writing Teachers Writing: Transforming through Creative Nonfiction A watershed experience is life-changing, transformative. The world was one way before the discovery,

insight, chance meeting or event, another way thereafter. Write about this watershed event,

relationship, decision, or understanding—whatever caused your life to take a new and meaningful

direction, or to change utterly. The narrative arc might proceed from the watershed’s causes to the

crucial moment to its consequences, for better or worse. Or concentrate only on the moment, magical

or otherwise, of major insight.

SPEAKER 6 (prompt): Home Languages

In “On Language,” Kyoko Mori describes the challenges of returning to Japan that are, in many ways,

linked to a language (and a country) from which she is now removed. Mori compares the politeness of

Japanese culture, reflected in its language, to that of Midwesterners. “Just like Japanese people,

Midwesterners don’t like to say no,” she writes. Using Mori’s essay as a jumping-off point, write about

one of your own “home” language communities and its hidden meanings, contradictions, revelations.

SPEAKER 7 (presentation): Voice Lessons: Creating Complex, Compelling Prose

Creating “voiced” prose is the CNF writer’s aim. Speaker 7 will lead participants in exploring subjects

using a variety of assumed voices. Adopting different emotional personas can help writers discover new

undertones we might not have been aware of. Experimenting with different voices may suggest new

rhetorical possibilities, such as incorporating dialogue. Speaker 7 will provide guidelines for participants

to reflect on their writing as well as implications for teaching.

SPEAKER 8 (prompt): First Job

It’s a typical day on your first job—however far back or near that might have been. Take us to that

workplace, and help us understand things: the setting, the tasks, the people, the conversations, the

circumstances, or so on. Give us a scene. But most vitally help us understand you in that place and

time—either through your years-ago consciousness or through the you of today, looking back.

SPEAKER 9 (prompt): Love’s Labors Found

Many fiction textbooks recount the pitfalls of writing effective love scenes: sentimentality, cutesy

euphemisms, high-drama dialogue. The same challenges apply to nonfiction, but in the real world,

couples don’t always meet cute; dialogue is often sappy, not snappy. Try writing a real-life love scene,

whether romantic or reflective of another love (parent-child, friendship). What makes a love scene a

love scene? How will your readers recognize it as such?

SPEAKER 10 (prompt): Unsettled in the Everyday

We write because “something is unsettled,” Lee Martin notes. Those unsettled somethings prompt us in

everyday ways. Consider the everyday objects you encounter at home, in your office, on the sidewalk.

W.02 Writing Teachers Writing: Transforming through Creative Nonfiction Settle on one that resonates. What happens when the wooden spoon knocks against the bowl? When

the wool coat scratches your wrist, when you tread over that patch of ground? Begin with physicality:

your sensory, bodily interaction with the object. Move to the place that hasn’t settled.

SPEAKER 11 (prompt): Graph of the Heart

Dance projects an “infinite number of feelings, emotions, and subtle moods” while telling a human

story. In a modern dance performance, we can recognize our experiences in the movements that

transform emotions into physical expression. Watching the video(s) provided, what stories do you see

unfolding? What emotions do the movements communicate? What memories or past events are called

up by the dance and why?

W.03 Feminist Workshop: Feminist Rhetorics of Resistance and Transformation Sponsored by: The Feminist Caucus Standing Group

Level: All

Hashtags: Pedagogy (#Pedagogy), Writing Program Administration (#WPA), Social Justice (#SocialJustice)

Abstract: This sponsored workshop explores intersectional feminism(s) and social justice in teaching,

administrative work, and rhetorical practices.

Full Description:

Sponsored by the CCCC Feminist Caucus Standing Group, the Feminist Workshop addresses a range of

perspectives and methods for cultivating feminist pedagogical techniques, mentoring of students and

colleagues, and providing opportunities for the examination of disciplinary theory as a springboard for

conversations on professional narratives of success in rhetoric and composition and across the academy.

In accordance with the CCCC 2018 theme of “Languaging, Laboring, and Transforming” and our

continued commitment to intersectional feminisms, we are interested in the ways that intersectionality

can be used to enhance our work in the field. Concerns for social justice and lived material

circumstances are at the heart of these efforts.

This day-long workshop will focus on ways we can create spaces for a variety of voices within feminism

and composition-rhetoric. The workshop features morning and afternoon panels, followed by breakout

discussion groups and a rotation of interactive exercises to activate the transforming of our labor as

teachers, scholars, WPAs, and feminists. The activities will encourage interaction between presenters

and participants in order to provide opportunities to create plans of action for the future. The day ends

with a debriefing section in which participants will review the workshop and construct plans for the

future to submit to the CCCC Feminist Caucus Standing Group.

Morning Panel: Intersectional Modes and Methods

Speaker 1: “The Feminist (Un)Conscious of Writing Studies: An Analysis of a Decade of Research Trends

in Four Major Writing Studies Journals”

This presentation shares the results of coding 536 journal articles from 2007 through 2016 in four

composition journals concentrated on feminist research methodologies, seeking to discover whether

feminist critiques of traditional research practices have (or have not) influenced the direction of

research in the field. The researchers discuss the extent to which feminist methodologies have become

just another research paradigm, suggesting that most recent research on writing does not foreground

feminist values and approaches nor does it give sustained attention to problems and populations related

to intersectionality.

Speaker 2: “Anti-Imperialist Methodologies for Intersectional Alliance-Building”

W.03 Feminist Workshop: Feminist Rhetorics of Resistance and Transformation This presentation draws on a history of 1970s intersectional feminist alliance-building focusing on the

Third World Women’s Alliance archives which demonstrate detailed theories and pedagogies for

alliance-building in response to the embodied exigencies of state-sanctioned violence stemming from

racism, sexism, and imperialism. This speaker argues that resurfacing such historical practices and

pedagogies of anti-imperialist intersectional alliance-building offers grassroots methods and

methodologies for intersectional interventions in the imperial university, and orienting to such historical

alliances demands an orientation to contemporary intersectional, anti-imperialist calls for solidarity such

as the Movement for Black Lives Policy Platform and 2017 International Women’s Day platform.

Speaker 3: “Talking Lesbian: Analog Radicals, Digital Labor”

Using an intersectional gaze backward, this multimodal presentation explores the tortured and often

hidden conversations about race, class, and sexuality in the Furies, a 1971–73 lesbian separatist

collective that produced The Furies, an underground newspaper with a national circulation. Drawing

from a series of recent interviews with the Furies, I ask how—and whether—to reclaim these

problematic forebears.

Speaker 4: “Recovering Latinx Identity: Using Documentary Filmmaking to Humanize the Dehumanized”

This speaker will screen scenes from her feature documentary Desaparecido that showcase her

Venezuelan family's four generations of immigration to the United States and the contributions they've

made to the country through their eight decades in America. She will use the scenes to discuss the ways

in which we can use home videos, filmed interviews with our relatives, and family history research to

counter the racist and inaccurate rhetoric used by the Trump administration to vilify particular

populations, as he has done with Latinx.

Afternoon Panel: Forging Forward

Speaker 5: “At the Nexus of Disability and Feminist Studies: The Ethics of Non-Normativity”

This session offers suggestions for, and invites exploration of, working at the intersections of feminist

and disability rhetoric as a way of resisting the institutional forces that seek to silence these

perspectives. By disabling our administrative and teaching practices, we can mobilize non-normative

ways of situating ourselves as scholars, teachers, and administrators. This disruption of patriarchal and

ableist narratives also responds to queer theory’s call to resist the totalizing impulses of

heteronormativity by insisting on an ethic of non-normativity.

Speaker 6: “Pursuing Higher Education Leadership: An Afrafeminist Perspective”

In Traces of a Stream, Jacqueline Jones Royster argues that an Afrafeminist framework enables her to

make overt connections between the everyday lived experiences of Black women and their work in

rhetorical action and literacy in public spaces (274). An Afrafeminist approach requires that Royster

W.03 Feminist Workshop: Feminist Rhetorics of Resistance and Transformation employ careful analysis, acknowledgment of personal attachments, attention to ethical action, and

commitment to social responsibility (279). Using an Afrafeminist lens as a framework, this speaker will

share how applications of Afrafeminism shape the ways in which Black women navigate higher

education leadership positions, drawing on her experiences transitioning from WPA in an English

department to a university faculty development position, revealing successes and challenges associated

with Black women working in administrative positions.

Speaker 7: "Resisting Patriarchal Structures: The Role of ‘Aunties’ in Indigenous Rhetorical Studies"

This presentation will look at how indigenous women scholars counter Western patriarchal structures by

bringing the traditional role of "aunty" with them into their lives as feminists, teachers, scholars, and

community members in organizations like CCCC. Specifically, this speaker will use the CCCC American

Indian Caucus as a model of how "aunty" organizational structures can create inclusive, equitable

spaces, transformational communities within the discipline.

Speaker 8: “Rhetorical Listening: Intersections of Gender and Whiteness”

Given the recent rise of "alt-right" discourse in the mainstream public sphere, this speaker will discuss

how a practice of rhetorical listening can help us formulate multiple responses.

W.04 The Transformative Laboring and Languaging of International Exchanges about Higher Education Writing Research Sponsored by: The International Researchers Consortium

Level: All

Hashtags: Multilingual (#Multilingual), WAC/WID (#WACWID), Pedagogy (#Pedagogy)

Abstract: Twenty-nine researchers from 20 countries and diverse research/language traditions share

drafts in advance; workshop enables dialogue, deep exchange.

Full Description:

Writing scholars must increasingly engage globally with diverse traditions, methods, and theories, as

well as complex cultural, political, and linguistic contexts, performing this labor within institutional and

social-political constraints that frame curriculum, pedagogy, and scholarship. Much international writing

research remains underrepresented because “equal exchange” global networking is difficult and

publication is often affected by small but powerful “gatekeepers” and language barriers. This annual

workshop has opened language borders and made space to explore, feel, and labor with each other

across cultures, contexts, and power relations. The scholars involved are learning to language and listen

in new ways, transforming writing studies through long-term, sustainable relationships that inform

literacy practice and writing pedagogy worldwide.

When writing researchers from different geopolitical, theoretical, national, and institutional contexts

come together to labor and to language, they need ample preparation to understand each other and to

negotiate multiple orientations: from simple terminology to deep theoretical grounding. Translating

practices and projects across national, cultural, and linguistic borders requires exchanging materials in

advance of the workshop, and extending time together to work toward real understandings.

The proposed workshop design addresses these challenges and enables this special scholarly labor. The

29 workshop “facilitators” are in fact the core of the workshop participants; unlike any other CCCC

workshop, our audience is constituted largely by these facilitators. Each facilitator reads a set of

international and transnational project drafts provided well in advance. Each project is explicitly situated

in writing theory and research traditions via information provided within the text drafts, which are in

different disciplines and differently grounded, theoretically and methodologically. Everyone participates

in six in-depth immersive synchronous discussions, encountering the situatedness of language and

writing research all day. Each perspective is explored on an assumed equal footing. Scholars studying

writing in different languages are welcomed, especially those typically underrepresented in the field.

Scholarly work is experienced on a personal level and in dialogue with other global perspectives,

fostering a deep kind of languaging encounter and encouraging avenues for dissemination and

publication.

W.04 The Transformative Laboring and Languaging of International Exchanges about Higher Education Writing Research The projects represent writing studies from Canada, China, Colombia, Denmark, England, Estonia,

Germany, India, Ireland, Lebanon, Mexico, New Zealand, Norway, Pakistan, Russia, Scotland, South

Korea, Turkey, the UAE, and the United States. The 25 projects and 29 researchers from diverse

national, cross-national, disciplinary, and multilingual contexts form the heart of our workshop

exchanges. They cover meta-analysis and meta-studies of writing research, using ethnographic, archival,

genre-based, corpus-based, or action research methods. Topics include transnational writing,

transdisciplinary WAC, and writing center practice; the challenges of graduate writing; tensions between

academia and emerging disciplines; reflective writing in personal development plans; and comparisons

of the use of ethos in business or academic writing. Several studies promote collaborative team-

projects, focusing on information literacy as conversation, developing spaces and strategies for students

in design education, finding approaches for writing instruction for students with learning differences, or

investigating research and publication expectations for faculty. Other projects explore language

revitalization, the rise of English as an international research language, writing in multilingual contexts,

the rhetorics of Jesuit mission work, and the perception of effective transnational rhetoric in social

media.

Workshop goals:

The workshop includes 3 interactive activities, 2 to be completed before the CCCC Convention:

1. By January, workshop facilitators post the following on a wiki (see

http://compfaqs.org/CompFAQsInternational/InternationalWritingStudies):

a draft research text, description of the rhetorical situation of the work, and glossary of

context/culture-specific terms to be used at the workshop

a digest of key theorists and methods and rationale for their use

a “public” abstract of the project for nonexpert audiences.

2. The texts are grouped into 6 clusters on the wiki. From January to March, workshop participants

(facilitators and any additional registrants) choose a text from each cluster to read closely, freeing

workshop time for real exchange. A video chat event between January and the CCCC Convention allows

participants to get to know each other.

3. At the workshop, all participants join six 45-minute clustered small-group discussions. Facilitators

become learner-participants when not discussing their own draft. Across the day, everyone encounters

current writing research, research questions, and emergent or well-established methods from several

countries, laboring as leaders/learners to question assumptions, negotiate tensions and differences,

model discursive practices that resist simple dichotomies, and construct useful responses and shared

concerns collectively.

W.04 The Transformative Laboring and Languaging of International Exchanges about Higher Education Writing Research Morning session: 15-minute introduction. 3 small-group discussion clusters, 45 minutes each. Sharing

cluster discussions with full-group, 45 minutes. Lunch in groups.

Afternoon session: 15-minute stage-setting. 3 small-group discussion clusters, 45 minutes each. Final

whole-group conversation/planning for future networking.

Chairs’ Focus Questions:

To engage with conference themes, the workshop chairs keep track of threads and look for connections

with these questions:

What is the laboring and languaging of writing research in different contexts? What new or

revised research methods and networks do we need to cultivate serious international

collaboration? Can we develop a richer understanding of transnationality?

What questions of student, teacher, or researcher languages, of institutional or national

languages, of disciplinary languages inform research being done? How do local settings shape

the teaching and research of writing?

How can international communities of writing scholars best labor together with the texts and

contexts of higher education while working towards responsible mutual engagement?

How can we help each other disseminate our research in ways that can transform the broader

field of writing research?

The workshop promises a deep exchange across international contexts, engaging projects and people in

sensitive, responsible, and productive ways. The dialogic nature of this exchange can reorient our

research horizons, increase our research capacity, develop networks of scholars, and engage

linguistic/discursive challenges that disrupt monolingual spaces to help us language and labor with

tolerance and grace in the 21st century.

W.06 Focusing on Students’ Labor: Becoming an Evidence-Based Coach of Effective Peer Learning in Writing (First-Year and Beyond) Level: All

Hashtags: Pedagogy (#Pedagogy), Assessment (#Assess), Technology (#Tech)

Abstract: Learn to design peer review so that routine feedback transforms writing behaviors and drives

high-quality revision.

Full Description:

Learning requires environments that are rich in feedback and revision. In the introduction to Peer

Pressure, Peer Power, Corbett, LaFrance, and Decker assert that although “the reward of collaborative

peer review and response can be significant and even transformative, those rewards can be difficult to

reap in practice” (6). That is, good peer learning outcomes are challenging to realize unless good

practices are modeled and taught. But in order to teach effective peer-based feedback and revision, it is

necessary to see students’ thinking.

Designed for both new and experienced teachers in any discipline, this hands-on workshop helps

teachers develop proven strategies for cultivating peer learning as a core practice. The workshop moves

instructors through six threshold concepts about peer learning using feedback and revision:

scheduling feedback labor;

making learning visible;

designing for helpful feedback;

coaching effort and quality;

requiring reflection and revision; and

becoming an evidence-based teacher.

To take best advantage of our time together, participants will bring to the workshop a first-draft

description about their approach to teaching feedback and revision and will iteratively develop it

throughout the day. Participants will leave the workshop having critically engaged the thresholds

through revisions to their statements, which will result in a manifesto for peer learning. In addition,

participants will leave the workshop with practices and action steps for facilitating peer learning in their

classrooms.

Participants will need a laptop with wireless Internet capability in order to participate in the workshop

activities.

Morning: Feedback and Revision (Student) Interactions

The first half of the workshop highlights ways of setting up feedback-rich activities.

W.06 Focusing on Students’ Labor: Becoming an Evidence-Based Coach of Effective Peer Learning in Writing (First-Year and Beyond) 9:00 a.m. To start, participants will provide feedback on each other’s manifestos about teaching

feedback and revision; the panel will help identify values, practices, and questions that inform the rest

of our day.

9:30 a.m. Threshold 1: Scheduling Feedback Labor

Participants will reflect on our opening feedback and revision iteration and discuss in small groups.

Speaker 1 will guide the groups as they consider ways to think about how frequently to engage students

in feedback and revision loops based on research-informed best practices, showing examples from

several disciplines. Participants will synthesize their insights in a one-minute paper, which will be

reviewed in small groups.

10:30 a.m. Threshold 2: Making Learning Visible

This section opens with a group brainstorming activity about the kinds of data teacher-researchers may

track in order to fully account for learning during feedback and revision. Speaker 2 will explain why

making learning visible matters to instructors and peers. Speaker 3 will introduce the engagement

analytics by examining the group’s first review activity; the group will talk about the trends and what

they mean. Participants will then make a personal list of data points/clues as a first step in developing a

methodology for doing evidence-based teaching.

11:30 a.m. Threshold 3: Designing for Helpful Feedback

Speaker 4 will explain how removing time and space boundaries for in-class review improved feedback.

Then, Speaker 5 will lead small groups in deducing other principles of effective review design from

examples, particularly by exploring how review prompts affect students’ cognitive load and influence

the feedback writers receive. Before the lunch break, participants will articulate three principles of

designing reviews that they’ll use to transform their teaching.

Afternoon: Feedback and Revision (Instructor) Interventions

The workshop’s second half situates review activities in a broader feedback-rich environment.

1:30 p.m. After lunch, Speaker 1 will synthesize the morning’s emphasis on designing feedback activities

and outline the afternoon’s focus on what instructors do during and between peer learning sessions

(e.g., coaching, commenting, grading, designing more reviews).

Speaker 6 will share how an online peer learning platform put feedback and revision labor in the center

of a hybrid writing class. The speaker will discuss how the class shifted through course design,

interactions, engagement, reflection, and student satisfaction.

W.06 Focusing on Students’ Labor: Becoming an Evidence-Based Coach of Effective Peer Learning in Writing (First-Year and Beyond) 2:00 p.m. Threshold 4: Coaching Effort and Quality

Participants will spend a few minutes freewriting about the instructor’s role in peer learning. Then,

Speaker 2 will identify ways of intervening well in peer learning. Participants will use those strategies to

give each other feedback on their freewriting. As model of coaching effort and quality, Speaker 3 will

provide a tour of analytics that can help instructors debrief with the class and individuals.

3:00 p.m. Threshold 5: Requiring Reflection and Revision

Speaker 4 will explore how revision plans facilitate reflection and promote transfer. Speaker 3 and 5 will

demonstrate a revision plan. Then, participants will build a revision plan for their manifestos that unifies

all the feedback they’ve received throughout the day; they’ll also add notes that specify the actions

they’ll take to transform their teaching.

4:00 p.m. Threshold 6: Becoming an Evidence-Based Teacher Every Day

After summarizing the day’s key ideas, Speaker 1 will challenge participants to make feedback and

revision labor in peer learning central to their pedagogies.

W.07 Public Intellectualism in Action: A Community Writing Workshop Level: All

Hashtags: Rhetoric (#Rhetoric), Professional Technical Writing (#PTW), Public, Civic, and Community

Writing (#Community)

Abstract: This full-day workshop will engage participants in a community writing project based on ideas

generated from a 4C17 Think Tank Session.

Full Description:

At the 2017 CCCC Convention, we (the organizers of this workshop) conducted a “Think Tank” session

titled “Public Intellectualism in an Anti-Intellectual Public: Implications for First-Year Composition.” The

session attracted 72 participants, and the level of energy and productive conversation exceeded our

hopes; it generated multiple follow-up discussions, and we wished we’d had more time.

This workshop extends the exploration begun in the 2017 Think Tank; we conceive of this extension as

the beginning of a community writing project that will ultimately (at some point in the future) result in

publishable texts. During the 2017 session, we explored these questions: Where do first-year

composition students (and first-year composition courses) fit into discussions of "the public

intellectual"? How do we define the "habits" of intellectualism and how do we develop them in first-

year writers? What can we do at the undergrad level to foster a genuine and generative intellectual

orientation among students who are growing up in a somewhat anti-intellectual era?*

*At the time we proposed the 2017 session, we were interested in discussing 2016 election rhetoric in

the context of anti-intellectualism; we did not anticipate that by the time of the conference we would

actually have a President Trump---not surprisingly, this reality took the Think Tank in directions we did

not anticipate but which we all agreed are now even more necessary to explore.

In addition to continuing that exploration, these are our goals for the CCCC 2018 Workshop:

1. To research and theorize pedagogical methods for imparting habits of intellectualism in first-year

writers.

2. To explore how such habits can serve students not only within the academy but also as an inoculation

and an antidote to coming of age in the era of fake news and alternative facts.

3. To explicitly engage the 2018 Convention’s focus by using our annual meeting “as a space for

languaging, for laboring with and about language, for practicing transformation and revolution with and

through language.”

4. Toward that end, we intend to use the workshop day as the initial writing laboratory in which we

brainstorm, pre-write, organize, and draft the initial phases of a collection of writing projects that aim to

theorize a pedagogy for teaching the habits of intellectualism.

W.07 Public Intellectualism in Action: A Community Writing Workshop 5. Essentially, we aim to use this workshop as a “particular scene of languaging and laboring” in which

we collectively create a writing community that lays the foundation for future writing projects. We

envision a writing space that is messy and exploratory and intensely creative, and we have designed a

structure to support it in ways that harness those qualities into a productive act of intellectualism.

More concretely, here are our plans for the full day:

9:00–10:00 a.m. Introduction to workshop and overview of content and goals, brief summary of CCCC

2017 Think Tank Session outcomes.

10:00–10:30 a.m. Brainstorming/pre-writing group sessions; we will form groups around specific areas

of interest related to teaching intellectual habits.

10:30–11:00 a.m. Groups will create concept maps and assign writing “jobs” for the planned tasks

(researchers, consultants, writers, critics/devil’s advocates, copy editors/proofreaders, etc.)*

*We realize that not everyone in the workshop will be interested in extending the day’s activities all the

way through the creation of publishable work (although we anticipate that many will); our intention is

that the workshop will serve as a “kick off” session for more formalized writing related to the pedagogy

of intellectualism in the first-year writing classroom.

11:00 a.m.–12:00 p.m. Research session--group and/or individual

12:00–1:00 p.m. Lunch

1:00–2:00 p.m. Groups reconvene and refine concept maps based upon research.

2:00–3:30 p.m. Writing and discussion

3:30–4:30 p.m. Entire community convenes to hear reports from each group about its progress over the

course of the day. The community will offer feedback.

4:30–5:00 p.m. Groups meet to articulate and schedule a plan for going forward with the writing project.

By 5:00 p.m., workshop participants will have “languaged and labored” together to flesh out a collection

of writing projects that address first-year writing pedagogies and curricula that focus on developing

habits of intellectualism. In order to give structure to these plans, we will use Wendy Laura Belcher’s

method articulated in Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks: A Guide to Academic Publishing Success.

Our intention is to use Belcher’s framework as a vehicle for carrying the process-oriented activities of

the workshop forward into the next phases of research and writing that will eventually culminate in

texts ready for publication.

Below is a tentative Works Cited list of resources we will provide to the writing community:

W.07 Public Intellectualism in Action: A Community Writing Workshop Works Cited

Cobb, John B. Jr. “The Anti-Intellectualism of the American University.” Soundings, vol. 98, no. 2, 2015,

pp. 219-232.

Crick, Nathan. “Publics and Intellectuals, Both Real and Unreal.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly, vol. 46, no.

2, pp. 176-193, doi: 10.1080/02773945.2015.1090250. Accessed 5 Feb. 2017.

Crowley, Karlyn. “Our Thinking about Crossover Scholarship is Wrong.” Inside Higher Ed. 5 April 2016.

Accessed 11 Mar. 2017.

Cushman, Ellen. “The Public Intellectual, Service Learning, and Activist Research.” College English, vol.

61, no. 3, Jan. 1999, pp. 328-336.

Greif, Mark. “What’s Wrong with Public Intellectuals?” The Chronicle of Higher Education 13 Feb. 2015.

Accessed 11 Mar. 2017.

Hardy, Sarah Madsen, and Marisa Milanese. “Teaching Students to be Public Intellectuals.” The Chronicle

of Higher Education 29 June 2016. Accessed 11 Mar. 2017.

Ikpe, Ibanga B. “The Decline of the Humanities and the Decline of Society.” Theoria, vol. 62, no. 1, March

2015, pp. 50-66, doi:10.3169/th.2015.6214203. Accessed 22 Feb. 2017.

Roen, Duane. “Writing Program Faculty and Administrators as Public Intellectuals: Opportunities and

Challenges.” WPA: Writing Program Administrators, vol. 38, No. 2, Spring 2015, pp. 159-172.

Williams, Ray. “Anti-Intellectualism and the ‘Dumbing Down’ of America.” Psychology Today 7 July 2014.

Accessed 11 Mar. 2017.

W.08 Transforming Writing Pedagogy with a Focus on Reading Level: All

Hashtags: Pedagogy (#Pedagogy), Writing Program Administration (#WPA), Theory (#Theory)

Abstract: Writing teachers and WPAs will learn about students’ critical reading ability and tested

strategies for improving writing through reading.

Full Description:

Recent publications (Keller, 2014, Chasing Literacy, and Carillo, 2015, Securing a Place for Reading…)

plus various special issues of journals like ATD, Reader, and Pedagogy show a growing interest in and

concern about students’ reading abilities. Studies released in 2016 (Stanford; NSSE) and 2017 (AAC&U

Value Study 2017) show clearly that students need help with critical reading and evaluation of sources

for use in their own writing. These studies build on a substantial series of quantitative and qualitative

research projects showing that students do not read as well as they could or should in order to succeed

in college and careers (NAEP, ACT). This workshop is meant to create productive dialogue with writing

teachers in two-year and four-year institutions as well as WPAs regarding college students’ reading

capabilities, and to provide specific, tested strategies for working on reading in writing classes and

programs.

This full-day workshop will have four major parts. Each part will consist of some formal presentation as

the basis for intensive exercises and discussion among the participants. The goal will be for participants

to leave with a full understanding of the relevance of explicit work on reading to the teaching of writing,

including these specific topics: 1) the nature of students’ current reading ability based on quantitative

and qualitative research; 2) the psycholinguistic character of reading as a cognitive activity; 3) lessons in

rhetorical reading and information literacy and their role in writing instruction; and 4) mindful reading as

a framework for classroom approaches. The session will include detailed references and a set of Monday

morning strategies for use in the classroom that participants will have experienced during the workshop.

Part 1: Students’ Reading Situation—Presenter 1

Presentation: Review of major quantitative and qualitative studies that reveal students’ present reading

abilities. Studies include the ACT Reading section, the Citation Project, Project SAILS on Information

Literacy, and some of the studies mentioned above.

Activities: Small groups will review samples from the ACT test and the AAC&U Value Rubrics for

discussion and evaluation of the validity of these measures of student abilities.

Part 2: The Psycholinguistics of Reading—Presenter 1

W.08 Transforming Writing Pedagogy with a Focus on Reading Presentation: Reading is a complex cognitive activity, requiring an array of skills that go beyond simple

comprehension of the words on a page or screen. The complex nature of reading will be discussed and

demonstrated. This discussion will lead to an explicit definition of academic critical literacy.

Activities: Five exercises will be completed in which participants will experience the complexity of

reading as an activity. The character of reading as a fast, meaning-focused activity that is only

“incidentally visual” (from a famous article on the topic) will be demonstrated so participants will have

direct experience with the features of reading.

A further exercise will entail making conscious the nature of academic critical literacy as readers will be

asked to analyze, synthesize, and evaluate a short passage as they develop hypothetical plans for how

they might use the passage in their own classrooms. Additional exercises for use in class will be

provided.

LUNCH BREAK—90 minutes

Part 3: Rhetorical Reading Inside Writing Courses and Programs—Presenter 2

Presentation: Participants will engage in collective consideration of what is meant by "college reading"

(vs. reading in other settings/purposes). How can we best characterize what college professors expect

students to "do" intellectually when they read? What are the various uses/goals/purposes of college

reading across the curriculum, especially in the context of research? The presentation will provide an

overview of the new information literacy framework from ACRL. Key guidelines for work with students

arise from these and various other sources.

Activities: Discussion of guidelines for classroom work followed by use of passages. Participants will

learn to apply 5 handouts: Guidelines for College Reading Pedagogy; Purpose-Driven Approaches to

Source Reading; Teaching How to Read Electronic Database Results; Research Logs; and Low-Stakes

Reflective Writing Assignments for Research Reading.

COFFEE BREAK

Part 4: Making Reading Visible within a Mindful Framework—Presenter 3

Presentation: The presenter will introduce the concept of mindful reading to participants. Mindful

reading is not another type of reading that might appear on a list alongside rhetorical reading, for

example, but a framework that contains the range of reading strategies that students might be taught.

The term “mindful” underscores the metacognitive basis of this frame wherein students become

knowledgeable, deliberate, and reflective about how they read and what different reading approaches

allow and enable. Mindful reading is related to “mindfulness,” a concept often associated with

Buddhism and used frequently in the field of psychology. The term mindful, when modifying reading,

describes a particular stance on the part of the reader, one that is open, flexible, and characterized by

W.08 Transforming Writing Pedagogy with a Focus on Reading intentional awareness of and attention to the present moment and the demands that it makes on

reading. This intense awareness, which is key to transfer, helps student-readers construct knowledge

about 1) reading, 2) the reading strategies they are practicing and testing out on a range of texts, and 3)

themselves as readers.

Activities: To practice strategies within the “mindful” framework, participants will try annotation of this

specific kind on a passage. The annotation activity will be shared with the whole group. Then, a similar

exercise will be done on a second passage using an unfamiliar topic from a different discipline so that

participants become more aware of their strategies for dealing with difficulty and the benefits of

creating a "difficulty inventory." Further discussion will address the importance of modeling annotation

practices in the classroom. Handouts on annotation and other strategies for class use will be made

available to support this work and prepare participants to teach these strategies to their students.

Summary and Conclusion

A final panel of all three presenters will lead a discussion of the day’s activities and answer questions.

W.09 Interrogating Composition in the 21st Century Level: All

Hashtags: Pedagogy (#Pedagogy), Rhetoric (#Rhetoric), Writing Program Administration (#WPA)

Abstract: Facilitators and participants interrogate key terms for composition in the 21st century.

Full Description:

This intersectional, intergenerational workshop addresses a range of perspectives on key terms for

rhetoric and composition in the 21st century. Building upon similar calls (Adler-Kassner & Wardle, 2015)

and responses to them, this workshop puts voices who are often excluded from typical disciplinary

conversations into direct contact with more conventionally represented ones. Together facilitators and

participants work together to confront terms that nag, vex, or otherwise remain with us whether we

want them to or not. New ideas that result from these productive dialogues compels us to come

together, share, and create.

Our workshop is structured for anybody, regardless of rank/status/experience, who shares our sense

that the ambiguities in our field’s dominant/framing terms are more than simply problematic or

interesting. We place particular emphasis on articulating research and advocacy trajectories based on

key terms in the field and create space for reflection and synthesis among all participants.

Short panels presented by workshop facilitators center around three themes: the profession, being, and

hegemony & power. These terms situate us as humans, as rhetoric and composition professionals, and

activists working for change. Presenters bring case studies and examples to illustrate their vexations and

creative responses to their vexations. Content of the presentations centers on the following:

a key term (listed below)

why the term resonates with them over time

methods and methodologies for responding to their vexation

a case for the key term’s (dis)continued/renewed/inaugural use in rhetoric and composition.

Facilitators will lead three breakout sessions with different deliverables to focus our conversations and

move participants toward developing action plans for future research, teaching, and advocacy:

Breakout 1: Participants are asked to articulate their vexations in ways similar to panelists.

Breakout 2: We return to small-group discussions to nuance, add, and focus our conversations into

concrete research questions.

Breakout 3: We return to small groups a final time to articulate pathways for collaboration and

mentorships within and across institutions.

W.09 Interrogating Composition in the 21st Century Following our third breakout, participants will then develop concrete action plans that allow them to

organize their thoughts so that we may carry our labor forward into institutional, classroom, research,

professional, and community settings.

We conclude the workshop with a short cool-down and check-in regarding the day’s events.

Focus Questions for Collaboration and Conversation:

What key terms should receive more attention in the fields of rhetoric and composition than

they currently do? And conversely, how do current uses of terms deflect/refract attention from

crucial issues?

What are the geneaologies of these terms, and how have these terms shaped the identity and

boundaries of the field in productive and/or limiting ways?

What are the sources or causes of vexation/nagging/haunting?

What methods might we make use of to create new knowledge of these terms? How might we

recover/reclaim/qualify terms whose uses have drifted in (un)helpful ways, or what alternative

terms can we put in conversation with unproductive ones?

In what venues might our work be housed?

How do our current understandings of the audiences for our work contribute to our vexation?

How or in what ways might key terms reach beyond Western exigencies?

Each presenter will focus their attention on one of the following key terms:

Best Practices

Graduate Pedagogy

Interdisciplinary

Social Justice

Generosity

Labor

Citizenship & Race

Assessment

Noise

Safety

Non-Western

Trans

Embodiment—in the writing center, in

the classroom, in our writing

Presenters represent the following professional statuses:

Assistant, associate, and full professors

PhD students and candidates,

Associate deans

Directors

Schedule:

W.09 Interrogating Composition in the 21st Century 9:00–9:30 a.m. Introductions and Orientation to Workshop

9:30–10:30 a.m. Panel One: The Profession

Graduate Pedagogy, Interdisciplinarity, Best Practices, Assessment

10:30–11:30 a.m. Breakout 1: Small-Group Discussion

11:30 a.m.-12:00 p.m. Reflection/Recharge

12:30–1:30 p.m. Panel Two: Being

Noise, Safety, Generosity, Trans, Embodiment

1:30–2:30 p.m. Breakout 2: Generating Research Questions

2:30–3:30 p.m. Panel Three: Hegemony and Power

Citizenship & Race, Non-Western, Labor, Social Justice

3:30–4:00 p.m. Breakout 3: Building Networks and Collaboration

4:00–4:45 p.m. Action Plans for Research

4:45–5:00 p.m. Concluding Forum

W.10 All Our Relations: Teaching Social Justice Movements Level: All

Hashtags: Pedagogy (#Pedagogy), Social Justice (#SocialJustice), Public, Civic, and Community Writing

(#Community)

Abstract: Cross-caucus pedagogy workshop on the labor of languaging social justice movements within

our collective classrooms.

Full Description:

Introduction:

As a homeland to the Hopewell, Mississippi, Kansa, Osage, Otos, and Missouri peoples and a diasporic

home to the Kickapoo, Pottawatomie, and Wyandotte peoples following a series of forced removals,

Kansas City has become both a gathering place and a contact zone for over 98 American Indian tribes.

This space of survivance grounds the American Indian Caucus in sponsoring a trans-Indigenous and

cross-caucus dialogue on social justice languaging and pedagogy. Kansas City, a landscape once

considered unfit for white settlers, is well-suited as a collaborative space of solidarity and activist

scholarship.

Rationale:

The study of social justice movements (Native Lives Matter, Standing Rock, and Water Protectors; Black

Lives Matter; LGBTQ, Arab/Muslim, and Latinx justices; and solidarities) as they are languaged in

classrooms is positioned on the grounds where rhetoric and composition meet Black, Latinx,

Arab/Muslim, Indigenous, and Queer studies. As scholars concerned with questions about the

relationships between power, history, knowledge-making, literacy, and language, we believe that all

teachers in rhetoric and composition are uniquely positioned to develop strategies for languaging these

social justice concepts in our collective classrooms. Thus, this workshop is meant to function as a

pedagogical gathering and grounding in our relationships with these justice movements, with the

activist bodies that perform them, with the land on which they are performed, and the solidarity they

gather.

David Wallace, in “Alternative Rhetoric and Morality,” states, “Our own, still-vulnerable disciplinary

position in the American academy robs us of the courage to recognize that oppression is a complicated

business that implicates all of us to some degree, and, thus, we must all make it our business to address

it, and those of us who theorize and teach rhetoric bear an additional responsibility to set forward a

morally responsible means for using rhetoric to seek justice in American society” (W34–35). We

understand that Wallace’s call of responsibility asks us to provide concrete models and create

opportunities for teachers to come together to share their experiences in these institutional spaces

while advocating for social justice. Along these lines, a social justice languaging approach to teaching

W.10 All Our Relations: Teaching Social Justice Movements rhetoric and composition creates an opportunity to cultivate and examine how all rhetorical practices

are constellated under the triad of body, space, and culture—an important consideration when

addressing the increasingly diverse student populations in our classrooms. The goal of this workshop is

to cultivate relationships with different academic bodies, including administrators, instructors, and

students, to answer the 2018 CCCC call asking us to create space for and make visible the languaging we

do. We invite participants to join us in also answering Wallace’s call of responsibility and in laboring

alongside us as we constellate social justice movements and languaging in our own classrooms.

Workshop Focus:

This workshop, sponsored by the American Indian Caucus in partnership with the Queer and Latinx

Caucuses and the Arab/Muslim SIG, is designed to show the process of building and cultivating

relationships across university and community contexts when working with social justice movements. To

act on Wallace's call to action, we establish goals that will specifically focus on the responsibilities we

have to advocate for social justice within the institutional spaces in which we work and teach.

The goals of this workshop are: 1) to provide participants with avenues through which to engage social

justice pedagogies while negotiating institutional expectations; 2) to provide different methods of

relating pedagogical practices to social justice movements; and 3) to provide instructors with ways of

language to address, discuss, and navigate systems of oppression. We will accomplish these goals in

three ways: 1) by providing intellectual contexts to anchor activities; 2) by providing hands-on

opportunities to develop strategies for incorporating social justice texts, activities, and practices into

various composing contexts; and 3) by modelling the pedagogical strategies and practices that are the

focus of this workshop. This learning-based workshop focuses on the needs of our participants by

fostering collaboration with experienced teachers of social justice to develop learning outcomes and

plan assignments tailored to participants’ local context and/or social justice leanings and desire for

participation. In addition, we’ll supply a wide array of starter resources for instructors, such as syllabi,

assignments, and curricular designs.

Activities/Sequences:

This full-day workshop begins with the history of the peoples on whose lands we are located and the

social justice movements that have taken place on the land that is Kansas City. This context is necessary

to understand the work of identity rhetorics as engaged with the histories, cultures, and political

realities shaping the spaces where social justice finds root and grows from. Following this context-

setting, presentation groups from participating caucuses/SIGs will briefly situate participants in a

pertinent social justice movement to provide basis for conversation and activities in the breakout

sessions. Presenters will discuss university specific contexts for identity-based social justice, situate

specific conversations based on their foci within social justice, and provide strategies to incorporate

social justice languaging within local curricular, institutional, and community contexts to demonstrate

W.10 All Our Relations: Teaching Social Justice Movements the variety of relationships where social justice pedagogies and related activisms can be incorporated.

This workshop incorporates presentations followed by breakout sessions to engage and cultivate

conversation. Participants will be encouraged to post questions during the presentations to help open

up options for discussion in the breakout sessions and the wrap-up. The workshop will resolve with a

constellating/wrap-up section in which facilitators and presenters will engage participants in discussing

the relationships and solidarity that exists between moments of activism and social justice.

Participants will leave the workshop with a better understanding of how to approach/work with various

academic situations in relation to social justice movements and with example activities to utilize in their

classrooms.

Schedule:

9:00 a.m. Introduction: Social justice and the peoples of Kansas City

9:40 a.m. Arab/Muslim SIG presentation and breakout session

10:40 a.m. Break

10:55 a.m. Queer Caucus presentation and breakout session

11:55 a.m. Queer making mini-session part 1

12:30 p.m. Lunch

1:30 p.m. Queer making mini-session part 2

2:00 p.m. American Indian Caucus presentation and breakout session

3:00 p.m. Break

3:15 p.m. Latinx Caucus presentation and breakout session

4:15 p.m. Constellating social justice/wrap-up

W.11 Isolated Languages and Out-of-Sync Labors: A Transformative Exchange between Military and Civilian Higher Education Faculty at the Army Command and General Staff College in Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas Level: All

Hashtags: Pedagogy (#Pedagogy), Professional Technical Writing (#PTW), Writing Program

Administration (#WPA)

Abstract: Workshop to foster faculty engagement with professional military education system to

enhance military affiliated student learning outcomes.

Please note that this is an offsite workshop.

Full Description:

The US military and higher education have a long history of deeply influencing each other. The end of

World War II and the first GI Bill drove innovation and change across higher education, and led to a

significant transformation of composition praxis and pedagogy. The social unrest of the 1960s and ‘70s

caused a schism between the two institutions. One byproduct of this schism was the isolating of

Professional Military Education (PME) from higher education. (The term PME describes the entirety of

the military education and training system that includes vocational training, undergraduate, graduate,

and postgraduate instruction.) This division hobbled collaborative research and limited exchanges

between the two academic communities, but most important, it constrained opportunities to prepare

students for transitioning into or out of the military. Just as the aftermath of World War II and the GI Bill

triggered an influx of students into higher education, however, the 9/11 attacks, conflicts in Iraq and

Afghanistan, and post-9/11 GI Bill have renewed an interest in working with student veterans and

students on active duty. Faculty in higher education and PME have begun to reexamine their areas of

mutual interest and initiate the building of institutional relationships reflective of the vital role both

higher education and PME play in shaping students and national culture.

This workshop aims to facilitate and hasten the transformative development of more systematic

relationships between civilian specialists in writing studies and PME faculty by promoting an immersive

exchange. The leadership of the Command and General Staff College (CGSC) has agreed to host the

workshop and believes that the immersion of workshop participants in an academic military

environment will present opportunities to find deeper, mutual connections, and allow participants of

4C18 to gain a more complete understanding of the goals and practices of the PME system. The need for

this understanding is particularly urgent, given that most specialists in writing studies have little

knowledge of, and even less access to, the PME system and its stakeholders despite a rise in students

aspiring to join the military or veterans matriculating into civilian higher education. This workshop will

serve as the initial scaffolding for greater future interaction and collaborative research by civilian

specialists in writing studies and PME faculty.

W.11 Isolated Languages and Out-of-Sync Labors: A Transformative Exchange between Military and Civilian Higher Education Faculty at the Army Command and General Staff College in Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas The location of 4C18 provides a rare and wholly unique opportunity to foster such engagement and

outreach, given the proximity of Kansas City to the CGSC campus at Ft. Leavenworth. The CGSC works

with both officers and enlisted students, which makes it ideal for engaging in a series of workshop

presentations and exchanges. In addition, the Army both staffs and supports the CGSC. The Army is the

largest service in the US Department of Defense, which means that Army ROTC cadets and Army

veterans are the most likely students that higher education faculty will encounter in the classroom. In

addition, the CGSC invites students from across the services as well as from foreign militaries to take

part in their academic programs. Accordingly, the composition of faculty and staff at the CGSC provides

a broad and representative view of the larger PME system. As a result, workshop participants will have

the opportunity to immerse themselves in the language and labor of the academic military community.

By laboring and languaging alongside PME faculty and staff, workshop participants of 4C18 will begin

spanning the schism between civilian and military academic institutions. Workshop participants will gain

a deeper appreciation of the practices and philosophies that shape professional military education.

Participants will also acquire a better understanding of the transitions students must make between

higher education, PME, and vice versa. Specifically, workshop participants will gain valuable insight into

the nature of professional military writing that can inform writing program administration, writing

program design, and classroom practices. In turn, workshop participants from 4C18 will bring an

understanding of writing pedagogy that can productively influence the practices of PME faculty. By

engaging in an immersive exchange of their unique languages and labors, PME faculty and 4C18

participants can begin to bridge cultural and research gaps to ensure transformation of the current

relationship and a broader and more fulfilling engagement that meets the needs of PME students as

well as active duty/veteran students in higher education.

Schedule:

Sessions and presentations to be facilitated by designated workshop facilitators, PME faculty, and

members of the CCCCs Standing Group for Writing with Current, Former, and Future Members of the

Military

08:00–09:00 Travel from conference center to Ft. Leavenworth/Command and General Staff College

09:00–10:00 Introduction and overview of CGSC (full group)

10:00–11:00 Writing assignment design approaches (small groups)

11:00–12:00 Preparing feedback and assessing student writing (small groups)

12:00–1:00 Cultural interaction (lunch mingle to include CGSC faculty, students, and administrators)

W.11 Isolated Languages and Out-of-Sync Labors: A Transformative Exchange between Military and Civilian Higher Education Faculty at the Army Command and General Staff College in Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas 1:00–2:00 Presentation on the professional military education system and CGSC’s role within that

system (full group)

2:00–3:00 Classroom observation and/or focused discussion on military professional writing (small

teams embedded in various schools throughout CGSC)

3:00–4:00 Research proposal exchange/troubleshooting (small groups)

4:00–5:00 Final synthesis (full group)

5:00–6:00 Travel from Ft. Leavenworth to conference center